Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to share with the House a visit I made recently to Thomas Chirnside Primary School in my electorate. Principal Bev Thompson invited me to come and see their professional learning communities on the ground. It is a state school, a primary school that is doing incredible work—with the support of needs based funding, obviously. The professional learning communities at Thomas Chirnside Primary School plan for student learning every day. They work together to create efficiencies in their team to ensure they know about the learning of every child in that school. They are doing amazing work and they are evidence that, when we use evidence based methods to improve learning outcomes in our schools, we get great results.

But these results take time. This school has been on this improvement journey for some six years, iterations of which have changed and shaped the way students in that school are learning. A delightful thing I found out at Thomas Chirnside Primary School was that a wonderful teacher there, Shannon Auld, had been a student of the high school where I was fortunate enough to be acting principal and taught young Shannon. It was pleasing to see her really relishing the profession.